The world of telecommunications is evolving at a rapid pace. Consumers are perceived to demand new features, especially in the area of multimedia services. Sharing files, video conferencing, sharing a virtual white board, and similar activities are helpful in the business context as geographically dispersed personnel try to coordinate efforts on projects. While the business world may be the driving force behind the need for such multimedia services, the residential consumer may also desire to take advantage of these services.
A few approaches have been proposed to provide integrated multimedia services. The first approach is to replace the customer premises equipment and network equipment with equipment that supports this functionality seamlessly. This approach is less than optimal for a number of reasons. First, it forces a large cost on the network providers and the consumers who have to replace costly, functioning equipment that, in many cases, is still well within its nominal life expectancy. Second, the older equipment has evolved over time until approximately three hundred different services are offered on this legacy equipment. After transitioning to the newer equipment, there will be a lag between deployment and reintegration of these services as new software must be written to implement the services on the new equipment. Many consumers of these services would not be happy with the loss of these services in the interim. Other drawbacks such as determining a standard or protocol and retraining users in the new hardware and software are also present.
A second approach has been proposed by the assignee of the present invention and embodied in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/960,554, filed Sep. 21, 2001, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. That application provides a way to integrate multimedia capabilities with circuit switched calls. In the circuit based domain, this solution is functional. However, there remains a need for integrating multimedia capabilities in packet switched calls while preserving presently deployed network hardware.